Candela Obscura: Circulus Veritatum Amissarum

The Circle Of Lost Truths

Light Keeper: Elizabeth Montgomery - Deceased by the end of campaign.

Circle Members: Enola Ross: Scholar and NPC. She was primarily responsible for research. What she knew depended on the dice, and in a combat/high-risk situation, her having a turn was usually because I was rewarding the team members who rolled two or more sixes in a roll. It was super fun to play that way, I'm not gonna lie.

Walter Dooley - AKA Walter Leideaux - Group Criminal, used an alias to hide the fact that he's the owner of Ledeu Cabeling, one of the first companies to help manufacture electrical cables. His father had managed to garnish a deal with Halen government forces during the Last Great War. Incredibly weather, but incredibly jaded about his childhood best friend and chosen brother going missing. Walter, instead of becoming a serious businessman like his father, chose to delegate the matters to capable employees who would help care for and run his company while he investigated his brother's disappearance.

His investigation led him to Candela, where he was received with expectancy instead of surprise. He was skeptical at first, but curious. Until he found out that his brother was, in fact, a member of Candela Obscura. His circle had gone missing for some time during an assignment. While most of his 7-member circle had been found dead in Old Faire at the site of the assignment, his brother and two others were instead missing. He went into his first Candela assignment with some hope that he might be alive and that Candela would lead him to wherever his brother was.

Character Fun Facts: The player of this character, *also my husband btw*, decided he wanted it to be a mystery to HIMSELF. "I already told you my brother is missing, and my search led me to Candela's doors. I want you to write the rest for me because I want to feel surprised by the end of the story." To which my SISTER said, "That sounds so fun! I've never played that way before. Me too! Me too!"

Thankfully, she was more generous with her character details and backstory than he was. 😅

Scarlet Ember: Group Weird. Veteran Battlefield Nurse of the Last Great War. Spouse to: Atticus Ember. She met her husband Atticus in the 6th year of the Great War, when he was brought into her medical tent maimed and almost gutted. Too injured to send back to a base hospital, Scarlett decided to use an heirloom her parents had given her for emergencies before her deployment to the front lines. She hadn't asked them where they got it. One night after she'd been shot in the shoulder during an ambush, she found the ring had healing powers if she held it over the wound. She waited until she was the only nurse in the tent and went to Attitcus, who looked like he had been ripped apart and nibbled on by a giant wild animal. She held her ring over the wound and found that when she pushed it to its limits, it drained her energy considerably. But after the first time she used it on him, his pulse was stronger, and his thin, rasping breath had almost evened. She used it on him every day, and little by little, each miraculous day by day, he healed. When he finally opened his eyes, she was the first person he saw, tears in her emerald-colored eyes framed by blood red hair.

"You're finally awake. I'm so happy. I've been waiting for you to wake up for so long." Her voice, her words were the first he heard.

When the war ended, they quickly eloped. But when they returned home to New Faire to meet Scarlet's parents, they were nowhere to be found. Their home had been trashed, and there was a splatter of blood on the walls - something they were both so familiar with as war veterans. The only thing missing was her parents' work research notes. Both of them were long-tenured scientists of EONS - the Esoteric Offices of New Science. This is the point where she looked at me and said, "What happened to my parents, GM?" Was super stoked to have that story fuel.

Atticus Ember: Group Soldier. Veteran Front Lines Soldier of The Last Great War. Spouse to: Scarlet Ember.

When his entire platoon was attacked that night in the most south-west battlefields of The Last Great War, Atticus knew that it was NOT the enemy they had come here to fight. They were supposed to be setting up an ambush, but the intelligence lacked any word of giant creatures that came up from the shadows with red eyes and fangs and claws. He was the only one in his platoon to survive, and that's because of the woman that he had to pick up off the floor of her parents' house, sobbing when they discovered her parents were gone.

The Periphary couldn't find any clues, except that there weren't any. To Atticus, a battle-weary soldier who almost died at the hands of an enemy he wasn't quite sure he didn't imagine.... this stank of a set up. Just like it stank when EONs came and interview him after he had woken up from his coma after being attacked. They had made him sign a NDA, and in very polite HR speak, said: "If you tell a soul what happened from this point forward, we will react with violence."

So he started his own investigation, and when Scarlet came out of her shock, she stood stronger than ever, back straight and eyes dry, and helped him.

And when they discovered Candela, Atticus wasn't sure whether he should roll his eyes or laugh. Magick? Alchemy. Secret Organizations. Something out of a novel that Scarlet liked to read. He lost some of his bravado when they handed Scarlet a journal with her mother's handwriting and signature on it. They were notes on EONS and the strange experiments that EONS started conducting in the middle of the war. The journal reported that her mother and father were investigating it. That a subsection of EONS had broken off, and started doing their own research, out of sight somewhere near the battlefields of Westwreck, to do strange experiments. It wasn't so amusing when, near the end of the campaign, Atticus finds out what really attacked him: A couple of EONS experiments had gotten loose, and that is what killed his entire platoon. And it had given him a virus that would change him forever.

Character Fun fact: I did NOT set out with the original goal to make "mad scientist made lyrcanthropes" with a whole tribe of unique people with their own secret island for the end of the campaign. Nor did I expect to have to create a mechanic for them. However, it was my brother from another mother who played Atticus, and we are basically twins grown in separate uteruses in separate years. So naturally, his favorite thing to do is annoy me. He was also SUPER stab happy, and I wanted him to calm down. When I forced him to transform into a beast was during mid-combat, made him roll to see who he would hit: the enemy or one of his circle members. He attacked his circle members. And he took a body scar and dropped, incapacitated, after he attacked his circle member, leaving only half of his party to handle the bad guy of that encounter.

After the encounter wrapped up, I said, "For real, you guys want to redo that? I'm not gonna force your character to be a phenomenon if you don't-" And they were like "WAT? NO! NOONOOONO!" and my brother was like "Don't you dare unpunish me!!"

SO then I had to make the transformation mechanics, stress mechanic, the rules, and the abilities and disabilities that came with it.

I enjoyed putting them in stinky situations after that. EONS was the big bad at the end of this campaign. An EONS scientist had found the secret to becoming... "more." Using his research, for a period of years, he kidnapped soldiers of the Last Great War from both sides and hired his own select and hand-picked team of scientists to conduct experiments on them. When an experiment went awry one night, mutated soldiers carrying a venom coated fangs and claws that would mutate the person they wounded - IF they survived. It took months to track down the experiments, and by then, Scarlett's parents were on to them. Scarlet's mother was a double agent for Candela, knowing that she couldn't trust her suspicions to anyoine instead of EONS or the periphery. Who knew how far her boss's corruption and idea of a "new world, alchemy no longer taboo, no longer rare. Old Faire thrived upon it, so shall we! And we won't make our forebearers' mistakes."

She knew it would be a matter of time. When Edward's corrupted EONS agent broke down their door and flooded the house, she had already notified Candela, the only truly neutral organization. One that had stood for the protection of people for centuries. Her husband had resisted, trying to protect her, and nothing could save him from the hot flash of a pistol. However, Edward had something else planned for her. She was valuable. He threw her into a room with a Shadow Eater, just long enough for her to fall into a coma, and for her body to become translucent. The only way to restore her would be to end the Shadow Eater that consumed her shadow until she was barely anything left. Then he left her at Grayslate Sanitorium under an alias to make sure she was difficult to find.

He then got control over the mutant experiments he had failed to keep contained and perfected them, creating mutated soldiers who could shift into monsters at command. But of course, a creature like that can't have their own will and autonomy, what if they betrayed him? So he designed collars that created a hypnosis state, where they obeyed him, and only him. And anyone who opposed him, including the Circle of Lost Truth, he'd deal with using them.

Edward promised so many people a new world. After raising an army of citizens who were excited for a new world, where wealth would be equal, and opportunity would be ample, and corrupting most of the periphery, he led them all to a location underground.

He sacrificed them, believing that this would change him into something eternal. He had found out about Unabridged, and the sacrifices that had to be made in order to become immortal to death and illness and age.

But he did it wrong. And instead, Veritas arrived just in time to watch him steal the living essences and lives of over a thousand New Faire citizens, and even the lives of some of the mutants he created himself, finally be overcome with the bleed of the alchemy and magick he was trying to use, and instead became a monster.

After critically wounding the creature Edward had become and pushing him through the tear, they closed the rip in the veil. And candela helped locate an island not yet on the map, in which the wolf-like mutated people could live , instead of trapping them in the Pharos. Atticus and Scarlet among them, to help lead the people that were like him, to live a peaceful life. A life where they couldn't ever be forced to the will of another again.

happy happy, the end!

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